Blasphemy, Heresy, Sacrilege: Francis’ Chaos in Colombia

A summary of the worst…

Blasphemy, Heresy, Sacrilege:
Francis’ Chaos in Colombia

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When someone like “Pope” Francis spends more than 4 days in Colombia, you know he will leave a huge mess to clean up. And indeed, in addition to Francis’ remarks about social inequality and his blessing of the adulterous union of the Colombian President and his mistress, there is a lot more to talk about.

As providing an examination of all the errors, heresies, sacrileges, and blasphemies the man committed during his “Apostolic Journey” would prove too daunting of a task, we will restrict ourselves to only a few select items that stand out.

SACRILEGE

We’ll begin with the twisted, bizarre, and downright sacrilegious ferulas Francis used for the Novus Ordo worship services (“Masses”) in Colombia.

The ferula (sometimes called crozier) is the pastoral staff a bishop uses during solemn liturgical functions. All of the false Vatican II popes since Paul VI have long used hideous/blasphemous ferulas, but Francis has taken the matter to a whole new level (recall his dental pick staff and his millipede ferula, for example). Typically one can tell what love for God and the true Faith Modernists even claim to have when looking at how they display the Body of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ (see the disgusting “Resurrection” sculpture in the “papal” audience hall or the “Cosmic Christ” painting in the Apostolic Palace, for example).

On Sep. 9, Francis offered the Novus Ordo worship service in Medellin (video here). He used a ferula with a twisted cross on which was displayed the corpus of our Blessed Lord in an undignified way:

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Later the same day, Francis held a meeting with clergy and seminarians, and behind him was set up this “pretzel stick” mockery of a cross (video here):

The following day, Francis used a similar utensil as a ferula (video here):

According to this video report, the two ferulas with the pretzel look were gifted to Francis as he visited Medellín — although this does not absolve him from the obligation of refraining from using blasphemous or sacrilegious paraphernalia. Keep in mind, too, that as the “Pope”, Francis can use any ferula and crucifixes he wants. There is no excuse whatsoever not to use the most dignified, solemn, and beautiful ferulas and crucifixes in the world.

But it gets worse from here.

When Francis arrived at the Colombian capital of Bogotá, he met with President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón, and they exchanged gifts. The Colombian president gave the “Holy Father”, among other things, a very large and ornate Rosary (video here) — a very fitting present for someone you believe to be the Pope. Francis, on the other hand, gave the Colombian head of state the most vile-looking and blasphemous thing he could find: a sculpture called Via Crucis (“Way of the Cross”), created in 1983 by Antonello Conti. It can be viewed here. The Italian blog Il Sismografo has more information on this blasphemous piece of trash, in Italian and English.

On Sep. 8, Francis held a special Prayer Meeting for National Reconciliation in Villavicencio (video here). At the center of the stage that had been set up for the event there hung a mutilated Christ — showing only the Head and the Torso, without the Limbs. It looked like this:

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This frightfully blasphemous rendition of Christ had an official “explanation”, of course. According to Vatican Radio, it is the replica of:

a broken Crucifix that once hung on the altar of a church in the town of Bojayà, site of a massacre of over a hundred people, mainly women and children in 2002. As paramilitaries and guerillas fought for control of a key drug trafficking route, terrified residents fled into the church.

FARC fighters launched gas cylinder bombs, one of which went through the roof and landed on the altar, blowing away the arms and legs of the crucified Christ.

(Philippa Hitchen, “Pope in Colombia: Key points from reconciliation event in Villavicencio”, Vatican Radio, Sep. 8, 2017)

That a Crucifix would get blown to pieces in a massacre of innocent people is bad enough. But to make a sculpture out of it and declare it to be “even more Christ”, as Francis did, is to add insult to injury. The false pope said:

We have gathered at the feet of the Crucifix of Bojayá, which witnessed and endured the massacre of more than a hundred people, who had come to the Church for refuge on 2 May 2002.  This image has a powerful symbolic and spiritual value.  As we look at it, we remember not only what happened on that day, but also the immense suffering, the many deaths and broken lives, and all the blood spilt in Colombia these past decades.  To see Christ this way, mutilated and wounded, questions us.  He no longer has arms, nor is his body there, but his face remains, with which he looks upon us and loves us.  Christ broken and without limbs is for us “even more Christ”, because he shows us once more that he came to suffer for his people and with his people. He came to show us that hatred does not have the last word, that love is stronger than death and violence.  He teaches us to transform pain into a source of life and resurrection, so that, with him, we may learn the power of forgiveness, the grandeur of love.

(“Pope addresses Colombian prayer for National Reconciliation: Full text”, Vatican Radio, Sep. 8, 2017; underlining added.)

If a broken/dismembered Christ were “even more Christ”, then our Blessed Lord would have allowed His Body to be dismembered. Instead, we read in Holy Scripture: “But after they were come to Jesus, when they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs…. For these things were done, that the scripture might be fulfilled: You shall not break a bone of him” (John 19:33,36; cf. Ex 12:46; Num 9:12).

That our Blessed Lord’s bones were not broken, nor His Body dismembered, has great theological significance. In his Great Commentary on the Gospel of St. John (available online for free here), Cornelius a Lapide explains:

In Exodus 12:46 God had commanded that while eating the Paschal lamb, they should not break any bones. The literal reason was, that they had to eat it in haste, so they would not have time to break the bones and extract the marrow. The allegorical reason was, because that lamb was a type of Christ who would be sacrificed on the cross, and God willed that no bone of Him should be broken, in order that His sacred Body, which was to rise again, should remain complete in every limb…. Symbolically, it signified: 1. That the Godhead of Christ (which was, as it were, the bone which supported His Body) remained entire and uninjured in His passion….

2. That the strength and vigor of Christ as man (on which the bones were a symbol and cause) were not diminished, but rather increased, by His passion….

The allegorical reason was, in order to signify that the bones of Christ’s body, that is, the holy Apostles, were not to be broken….

A propos, S. Hilary, commenting on Psalm 40, says: The bones of Christ were not broken, because the Church, which was formed of His bones, ought not to be weakened by the breaking of bones.

(The Great Commentary of Cornelius à Lapide: The Holy Gospel according to Saint John, trans. by Thomas W. Mossman, rev. and compl. by Michael J. Miller [Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2008], pp. 744-745)

Besides, as the Paschal Lamb of the New Covenant (cf. Jn 1:29), our Lord had to be, like the Paschal lamb of old, “a lamb without blemish” (Ex 12:5), and so it was most fitting that the integrity of His Sacred Body should not be compromised, for He was the “lamb unspotted and undefiled” (1 Pet 1:19).

Attacking the Sacred Body of Christ was not enough for the apostate Jesuit, however — Francis also had to profane the Precious Blood of our Lord.

BLASPHEMY

On the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Gospel of the day was Mt 1:1-17, which lists the genealogy of Christ and thus establishes that our Blessed Lord is truly a Son of David (cf. Mt 21:9). Had He not been of the house of David, Jesus of Nazareth could not have been the true Messiah.

During the Novus Ordo worship service for the day, at which Francis also “beatified” two Colombian martyrs, Francis preached on the genealogy of our Lord and said the following (video here):

In the Gospel, we have heard the genealogy of Jesus (Mt 1:1-17), which is not a “simple list of names”, but rather a “living history”, the history of the people that God journeyed with; by making himself one of us, God wanted to announce that the history of the just and of sinners runs through his blood, that our salvation is not a sterile entity found in a laboratory, but rather something concrete, a salvation of life that moves forward. This long list tells us that we are a small part of a vast history, and it helps us not to claim excessive importance for ourselves; it helps us elude the temptation of over-spiritualizing things; it helps us not [to] withdraw from the concrete historical realities in which we live. It also integrates in our history of salvation those pages which are the darkest and saddest, moments of desolation and abandonment comparable to exile.

The mention of women – though none of those referred to in the genealogy has the category of the great women of the Old Testament – allows us a particular rapprochement: it is they, in the genealogy, who tell us that pagan blood runs through the veins of Jesus [por las venas de Jesús corre sangre pagana], and who recall the stories of scorn and subjugation. In communities where we are still weighed down with patriarchal and chauvinistic customs, it is good to note that the Gospel begins by highlighting women who were influential and made history.

(Antipope Francis, Homily at “Beatification Mass” in Villavicencio, Zenit, Sep. 8, 2017; underlining added.)

We won’t even bother to comment on the silly remarks about the “sterile entity found in a laboratory” and “over-spiritualizing things”. However, we cannot let this one go: “pagan blood runs through the veins of Jesus”! This is simply outrageous!

It is certainly true that in the blood lineage of our Lord, there were not only the just but also sinners — so “that He who came for sinners being born of sinners might so put away the sins of all” (St. Jerome; qtd. in Catena Aurea I:1, p. 19). It is likewise true that our Lord’s ancestors included both Jews and Gentiles. But to say that our Lord had “pagan blood” running through His veins is an insult that defies belief!

Under the Old Covenant, the label “Gentile” was used for anyone who was not a Jew, i.e. not of the seed of Abraham; thus the world was divided into Jews and Gentiles. This distinction was rendered obsolete in the New Covenant, where the Chosen People are those who are baptized in Christ and adhere to His Gospel (i.e. the members of the Catholic Church), regardless of their carnal lineage (cf. Gal 3:14,28; Jn 6:64,8:39).

To say, therefore, that in our Lord’s genealogy we can even find Gentiles would be correct. For example, St. Matthew mentions Rahab and Ruth: “And Salmon begot Booz of Rahab. And Booz begot Obed of Ruth. And Obed begot Jesse” (Mt 1:5).

Rahab was a Gentile and a great sinner. In the book of Josue she is described as a “harlot” (Jos 2:1), but she converted to the true God when she hid the Israelite spies in her house to protect them from the King of Jericho, telling them:

I know that the Lord hath given this land [Chanaan] to you: for the dread of you is fallen upon us, and all the inhabitants of the land have lost all strength. We have heard that the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea at your going in, when you came out of Egypt: and what things you did to the two kings of the Amorrhites, that were beyond the Jordan: Sehon and Og whom you slew. And hearing these things we were affrighted, and our heart fainted away, neither did there remain any spirit in us at your coming in: for the Lord your God he is God in heaven above, and in the earth beneath.

(Josue 2:9-11)

Ruth was a Moabite and had been brought up in pagan idolatry. However, she too converted to the true and living God: “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”, she told her mother-in-law, Noemi (Ruth 1:16). “Ruth married Booz for the reward of her faith, for that she had cast off the gods of her forefathers, and had chosen the living God”, we read in Pseudo-Chrysostom (qtd. in Catena Aurea I:1, p. 21).

It was due to Ruth’s upright moral character, spirit of self-sacrifice, and piety that she ultimately became the great-grandmother of King David. St. Ambrose writes that despite being a Gentile, Ruth “deserved to be numbered in the Lord’s lineage” on account of being “holy and unstained in her life above the Law” (qtd. in Catena Aurea I:1, p. 21). In the Holy Bible we read that Noemi was congratulated for having Ruth as a daughter-in-law:

And the women said to Noemi: Blessed be the Lord, who hath not suffered thy family to want a successor, that his name should be preserved in Israel. And thou shouldst have one to comfort thy soul, and cherish thy old age. For he is born of thy daughter in law: who loveth thee: and is much better to thee, than if thou hadst seven sons.

(Ruth 4:14-15)

Scripture scholar Fr. George Leo Haydock (1774-1849) mentions in his introduction to the book of Ruth that Ruth “being a Gentile, became a convert to the true faith, and marrying Booz, the great-grandfather of David, was one of those from whom Christ sprang according to the flesh, and an illustrious figure of the Gentile church.” He adds that “Christ proceeded from the Gentiles, as well as from the Jews, and his grace is given to both.” Thus our Lord “hath made both one, … breaking down the middle wall of partition” (Eph 2:14) between the Jewish and the non-Jewish race.

So, it is clear that in the genealogy of Christ we find saints and sinners, Jews and Gentiles. However, that is not what Francis said. Francis said that “pagan blood runs through the veins of Jesus”!

Blood can be Gentile (that is, come from outside of the seed of Abraham), but it cannot be pagan. Paganism denotes sin; it denotes idolatry, typically of the polytheistic kind. To say that our Lord has “pagan blood” in His veins is to assert that our Lord’s Most Precious Blood was defiled by sin, by idolatry — and obviously such stained blood would never have been able to redeem us:

“In whom we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace…” (Ephesians 1:7).

“Knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things as gold or silver, from your vain conversation of the tradition of your fathers: but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled…” (1 Peter 1:18-19).

“How much more shall the blood of Christ, who by the Holy Ghost offered himself unspotted unto God, cleanse our conscience from dead works, to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:14).

“But if we walk in the light, as he also is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7)

To say that our Blessed Lord has “pagan blood” in His veins is a blasphemy so horrendous that one shudders to mention it even to condemn it! It is also an implicit denial of the Immaculate Conception and sinlessness of His Mother (cf. Lk 1:28). That Francis would say this during a “Mass” at which he greeted a man in an indigenous (pagan!) outfit, aggravates this spiritual crime even more.

This is by no means the first or only time that Francis has insinuated or stated that our Blessed Lord was defiled by sin. In late 2015, he claimed that the twelve-year-old Jesus “probably had to beg forgiveness” of his Mother and his foster-father for having remained in the Temple in Jerusalem (cf. Lk 2:41-52)! In early 2016, the same “Pope” outrageously asserted that Christ “became sin” for us, and a year later he kicked his blasphemy up a notch by proclaiming that Christ “made himself the devil for us”!

Clearly, a sinful Christ, a Christ stained with sin even to the point of becoming the devil himself, seems to be a common theme in Bergoglian theology.

The following words of St. Paul to the Hebrews are very much applicable to Francis: “How much more, do you think he deserveth worse punishments, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath esteemed the blood of the testament unclean, by which he was sanctified, and hath offered an affront to the Spirit of grace?” (Heb 10:29). Perhaps it was this blasphemy against the Blood of Christ that made Our Lord allow Francis to suffer an injury two days later that stained his white cassock with his own blood:

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In addition to all this blasphemy and sacrilege, however, Francis also managed to utter heresy during his trip to Colombia. (Which is not to say that many of his blasphemies aren’t also heretical.)

HERESY

On Sep. 7, Francis stayed at the Apostolic Nunciature in Bogotá for the night. According to a report by Vatican Radio, he was greeted by “a group of children and teenagers with mental disabilities waiting for a word and the comforting touch of the man who never fails to uphold their rights and their human dignity.”

Just to be clear: The following criticism is directed entirely at Francis, not in any way at the children. These sweet disabled children are the victims in this, for they were naturally expecting to see a real Pope give them sound instruction, edifying comfort, and spiritual help in conformity with Catholic Faith and morals. Instead they got error and heresy wrapped in feel-good terminology that, yes, certainly comforted them psychologically for the moment but did so at the expense of their spiritual well-being.

Trying to make the children feel better about their various struggles and difficulties, Francis said: “Vulnerability is the essence of the human person”, according to the same report by Vatican Radio. He did not stop there, but before we go further, we must examine this much.

It is certainly clear that all humans are vulnerable, however we want to define the term. That’s because we are mortal. But vulnerability is by no means exclusive to man. Animals and plants, too, are vulnerable because they too are living organisms. If Francis’ definition of the essence of man were correct, then plants and animals would also be human. (In light of his environmental encyclical, perhaps this is indeed what he is proposing!)

Thus, to say that vulnerability is the essence of man is manifestly false. To see this should not be difficult even for a Jesuit:

The essence of a thing is its nature, that whereby it is what it is. It is what we grasp intellectually when we identify a thing’s genus and specific difference. To take a stock example, consider the traditional Aristotelian definition of a human being as a rational animal…. The definition gives animal as the genus under which human beings fall and rationality as that which differentiates human beings as the species they are within that genus (hence “specific difference”). If the definition is correct [and it is! –N.O.W.] it gives us the essence of a human being.

(Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction [Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014], p. 211; italics given.)

The essence of man is the union of a material body and a rational soul, as even a simple college textbook knows:

Man is a composite of body and soul…. The human soul is united to the body as its substantial form. Body and soul together constitute one nature…

Man is neither an angel nor wholly an animal. Both spirit and body are essential to his nature. To live humanly is to maintain the delicate balance of body and soul.

(William B. Murphy et al., God and His Creation [Dubuque, IA: The Priory Press, 1958], pp. 419,425; bold print removed.)

No one can change the essence of man — least of all an apostate from Argentina.

For Francis to substitute something else for the essence of man — no matter how emotionally satisfying it might be for the moment — is a very serious matter because to change man’s essence means to change what man is. And this, in turn, leads to all sorts of other problems: “Grievous mistakes have been made concerning man’s goal, his moral code, his rights and obligations, because men have made the fundamental error of not knowing their true nature” (Murphy et al., God and His Creation, p. 410).

Having informed the world that vulnerability is the essence of man, Francis proceeded to announce: “We are all vulnerable, except for the Lord himself”. By stating this, Francis managed to top his philosophical howler with a christological heresy! By saying that the essence of man consists in vulnerability and then denying this very essence of Jesus Christ, Francis denied — at least in intent — that our Lord was truly man!

Although it is certainly true that the Son of God was not a human person (only a Divine Person), in the Incarnation He did take on a human nature: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…” (Jn 1:14). The Fourth Lateran Council was very clear about how the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity took on the human essence, speaking of Him as “the only begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, incarnate by the whole Trinity in common, conceived of Mary ever Virgin with the Holy Spirit cooperating, made true man, formed of a rational soul and human flesh, one Person in two natures…” (Lateran IV, Ch. 1; Denz. 429).

Thus, Francis denies our Lord’s humanity twice: once by saying that the nature of man is vulnerability (which denies that body and soul are the nature of man); and once by denying this very vulnerability of Christ (which he claims is the human nature).

Keeping track of Francis’ wickedness really is a full-time job!

NEAR-ACCIDENT WITH “POPEMOBILE”

Lastly, there has been a curious media blackout on an incident that took place on Sep. 8 while Francis was receiving the adulation of the crowds in Villavicencio: The “Popemobile” nearly killed a man who jumped in front of the vehicle. Take a look at this video clip, which captured the event:

While we’re certainly not trying to assign blame to the driver of the Frankmobile, it is puzzling that this has not received the wide media attention an incident like this would normally get.

Thus far our summary of various errors, heresies, blasphemies, and sacrileges “Pope” Francis committed during his trip in Colombia.

Francis won’t care what you think of him as long as you acknowledge him to be the Pope of the Catholic Church, because it is from this (false) supposition that all of his power derives in the practical order.

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